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Friday I'm In Love

Noel Gallagher x fem!reader

Summary: after months of long distance and weeks after he called her to say that they wouldn't work out like this, one turn of fate made a new possibility of a future together appear in form of a letter

Warnings: angst, long distance, lovers to broken up idiots to lovers, yearning Noel, desperate Noel, loverboy Noel, fluff

Wordcount: 3.7k

Masterlist, Britpop Masterlist

His last call had been three days prior but the script was still embedded in her mind. Projecting in flickering lights on her bedroom ceiling, the blanket pulled up to her nose as she hid from the broken fragments of a promise he took back a few hours later.

The highways were free and the city was as calm as it could get. No stormy weather was announced, no rain that could potentially sicker through the old parts of his car roof. Nothing outside of his control was keeping him in London, but he still couldn't find the time to get back to Burnage—back to her or even call her back.

Creeping down the stairs, cursing out the old age of the house every time a floor board creaked underneath her steps. The moonlight was guiding her to the place she seemed to spend most of her time staring at these days. The phone was shining under the light like a diamond in a dark room to be admired. It looked like it wanted to be bought by someone outside of this house.

highflyingcami

i can see clearly now

cw: a tiny fluffy sleepy blurb from my “the rivalry” series from when they were starting to sneak around, this is for my 4 eyed baddies <3

highflyingcami

OLD HABITS - PART SEVEN

cw: childhood friends to lovers; slow burn; manager!reader; angst; smut.

𑣲 word count: 13,6k. ˊˎ-

wn: rejoice. refucking joice u guys. if any of u read this without reading the other chapters first im literally gonna hunt u down with an axe

dykwimean

WALK THE TALK: PART FIVE [18+]

Noel Gallagher x f!Reader

SUMMARY: The game continuous on, and on, and on, and on. You and Noel feature headlines spanning from 1996 to 2006, reigning as the most turbulent pair anyone has ever seen.

WORD COUNT: 22, 624

WARNINGS: Drug use, mentions of eating disorders, weight shaming, misogynistic language, slut-shaming, piv sex, rough sex, name-calling during sex, spitting, slapping, sexualised sapphic relationship, implied homophobia, fingering, oral m! receiving, choking during sex, cockwarming, no mentioned condom use, cunnilingus, semi-public sex, female masturbation, leaked sextapes, cheating

This is it! We’ve reached the end. I’d like to thank all of you for loving this series, I’d like to thank anon for requesting this juicy fic, and I’d like to thank every soap opera i’ve ever watched for making me write insane plots as i go. this is a long one and i think it’s the best shit i’ve written so PLEASE LET ME KNOW EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT AND REACTION YOU HAVE … THIS SHIT IS GAGGY … live react if u can omg puh-lease babes … pleak

Series Masterlist

snowywrvites

ྀིྀིྀིྀིྀི𝓝oel 𝓖allagher pfps - credits isn’t needed.!

dykwimean

GREAT RESPONSIBILITY PT.7 [18+]

SUMMARY: It’s one bad decision after another, and maybe a few days in between where you convince yourself that everything’s fine. Maybe.

WORD COUNT: 13, 957

Series Masterlist

kakluis

Noel Gallagher is so Mr.Darcy

highflyingcami

OLD HABITS - PART SIX

cw: childhood friends to lovers; slow burn; manager!reader; angst; noel’s pov.

𑣲 word count: 4,6k. ˊˎ-

wn: 🚬 hello i am drunk and posting this an hour earlier who cheered

alicegoingnowhere

Love Spreads

pairing: 97!Noel x Fem!Reader wc: 14.2k summary: A charity album. Twelve tracks. One month. You didn't expect to spend most of it arguing with Noel Gallagher — and you definitely didn't expect to like it. cw: slow burn, enemies (not really) to lovers, making out, looong one shot, sexual tension An: Hi... did you guys miss me? (pls lie to me and say you did) I'm actually kinda embarrassed of how long it took me to make this request... but hey, it's here! I really hope you enjoy this bc damn... this was hard. As always I'm not really sure if I love it or hate it, so let me know what you think.

You've spent three weeks trying to explain to your mother what War Child is and why you're going to spend the month of October in a recording studio in London writing a song with people who appear in magazines. A charity, you tell her. For the kids. She nods like she understands and then asks if you're getting paid, and you tell her no, that that's sort of the whole point, and she nods again in exactly the same way despite looking at you in a way that means precisely the opposite.

The truth is you haven't quite managed to believe it yourself.

People are already talking about the nineties as if they're over, driven by that particular impatience to declare the past dead so the future seems more urgent, but you know they're not. Not yet. It's still happening. You can feel it in the London air when you walk through the streets at ten in the morning with a cloth bag on your shoulder and your headphones half on, like the whole city is vibrating at a frequency only certain ears can pick up. It's still happening and you, in some way you haven't quite worked out yet, are inside it.

Less than two years ago you were a girl with a secondhand guitar recording demos in the bedroom of a shared flat in Brixton. Then the single came out, then the EP, then someone put it on the radio at a moment when people needed it, and suddenly your name started appearing in places it hadn't appeared before. It's not like you were too famous, not yet. It was more complicated than that. You were the kind of person people talk about as if they've known you their whole lives even though they've only just discovered you, and that has its own weight, its own strangeness, that you still haven't found a way to carry naturally.

And now you're here.

The studio War Child booked for the project is in Westbourne Grove, in a building that looks like an abandoned print shop from the outside and smells of old wood on the inside. You're met by a man named Richard, who's carrying a folder too thick for whatever's inside it and the expression of someone who's spent weeks coordinating egos and has learned to smile with his teeth without it reaching his eyes.

"Welcome, welcome," he says, shaking your hand with too much energy. "We're very pleased to have you. The project, as you know, brings together several groups of artists, each producing an original track, and all proceeds go directly to recovery programmes for children in active conflict zones. It's an album we want to be both a musical document and a statement, you understand? That music can be a political act as well..."

You nod. Richard speaks like he's reading from a press release he wrote himself, with the cadence of someone who's repeated the same speech enough times to have lost the pulse of it. But the cause is real, you know that, and that's enough to be here.

"Your group," he continues, opening the folder with the air of a surgeon, "consists of three artists. You, Tricky, and—"

He pauses very briefly, checking the list carefully so as not to get it wrong.

"Noel Gallagher."

You can imagine the look of surprise on your face from Richard's amused expression.

Noel fucking Gallagher.

You've seen him a thousand times in photos, on magazine covers, in the Don't Look Back in Anger video that your flatmate's telly was showing the afternoon you first moved out and that left you with a feeling akin to vertigo. But knowing someone exists is one thing. And having them in the same room, breathing the same air, is something else entirely.

You say oh, which is all you're capable of producing, and Richard nods as if he understands perfectly, because he's probably seen it several times already this week.

Noel arrives twenty minutes late. Not a scandalous amount of time, but there's something in the way he enters that suggests he doesn't consider it a problem either. And he opens the studio door with the ease of someone who knows these kinds of places better than his own house — and probably prefers them.

He's taller than you expected, he looked shorter in photos —or maybe it's just that he fills a space in a way that makes everything else seem slightly smaller— and he's wearing a jacket that fits him too well for that to occur to you as a casual thought.

He sees you before Richard has time to make the official introductions. Looks you up and down, no attempt to hide it but nothing rude about it either; you notice he hasn't needed to bother hiding things for a long time.

"You must be the EP girl,"

Not an insult, but not exactly a compliment either. Just his way of telling you he knows who you are without quite conceding the effort of proving it, and you notice, because you've been in this long enough, even if it hasn't been long, to know when someone's sizing you up.

"And you must be Noel Gallagher," you say, with exactly the same intonation.

"Guilty," he says and comes over to shake your hand, what looks like the beginning of a small smile forming at the corner of his mouth.

When you shake it, he holds your gaze a second longer than strictly necessary, with an attention that isn't deep at all, one you recognise perfectly because it's the gaze of a man who does that with pretty girls out of pure reflex, almost without thinking, like breathing. Which doesn't stop you noticing it, and is, you decide in that instant, a bit annoying.

"I've heard good things," he says. "About your music, I mean."

He says it with a smile that carries among other things underneath it, though he doesn't say it, and you hear it anyway.

You withdraw your hand.

"How kind," you say, equally lightly.

Richard, who has witnessed the exchange with the expression of someone switching off mentally, steps in energetically, needing this to work.

"Fantastic, fantastic. And Tricky should be here any minute, I've been told that—"

The door opens.

Tricky walks in with his hood up despite being indoors; you don't need an introduction. Trip-hop, a voice that sounds like it comes from underneath, like you'd need to dig a little to reach it. He put out Maxinquaye last year, which you listened to three times in a row one night you couldn't sleep and that left a strange feeling in your chest. He's the kind of artist who doesn't fit anywhere in particular and is therefore impossible to ignore, and seeing him here, in this studio, on a Tuesday morning, alongside Noel fucking Gallagher, has something unreal about it.

He greets the room with a nod that takes in the whole space without addressing anyone in particular, and drops onto the sofa at the back with the posture of someone who's been awake or asleep for too many hours, hard to say which. He looks at you, points at you with two fingers.

"I listened to your EP," he says, straightening slightly from the sofa. "That second track's got something. That bit where the guitar comes in two bars late."

"That was a mistake," you say.

"I know," he says. "That's why it's good."

You laugh. There's something genuinely pleasant in how he says it, no artifice, as if it's simply a fact. Noel, from where he's standing, says nothing, but you notice he's watching the two of you with an attention he's pretending not to have.

Richard opens the folder at a page marked with a yellow Post-it.

"Right, if you're happy, we'll start with an initial session, nothing formal, just talking about the approach you want to take with the track. The album as a whole has a fairly open sonic direction, so you've got quite a lot of freedom to—"

Tricky's phone vibrates. He looks at it, stands up.

"Gotta make a call," he says, and leaves the way he came in with the same energy he arrived with, which is low but heavy.

The door closes. And there you are: you, Noel, Richard, and that particular kind of silence that sets in when nobody quite knows what to say.

Richard looks at the door. Looks at his folder. Looks at the door again.

"He'll be back in a minute," he says, with a conviction his eyes don't support.

And from somewhere down the corridor, muffled by two walls and a considerable distance, comes a fragment of voice you recognise without effort because it would be hard not to, too specific, too loud for the context:

"Don't come at me with that bollocks, Dermot, I know exactly what you said—"

Interrupted by another voice, calmer but with enough edge to register, then silence, then the first voice again, further away now.

Noel closes his eyes. Just for a moment.

"Your brother?" you ask, because you can't help it.

"Who else," he says, without opening them yet.

After a few minutes Richard takes the opportunity to run through the schedule with you, precise despite knowing that as soon as he leaves the room nobody's going to stick to it. Four weeks, minimum three sessions a week, an immovable delivery date because the mastering is already booked. He leaves a folder with each of you — logistical details, studio contacts, a sheet with the cause written in careful language. You read it. Noel leafs through his and sets it on the table with just enough care that it doesn't look like a slight.

When Richard leaves, promising to come back with Tricky, the room goes quiet.

A different silence to before, when there were more people and the possibility that anyone might fill the space. Now it's just the two of you and the low, constant hum of equipment that's been on since before you arrived.

Noel gets up and moves slowly around the room in a way that resembles reconnaissance. He runs his fingers along the edge of the mixing desk without touching anything. He stops in front of one of the guitars someone has left on a stand and looks at it for a moment but doesn't pick it up.

You're sitting with your notebook open on your knees because you've spent weeks jotting down loose ideas for this —fragments of melody, words that might go somewhere even if you didn't know where— and now that you're here, and he's there, the page suddenly feels too exposed, too yours for this moment. So you close it.

"Have you got anything in mind already?" you ask.

He turns. Looks at you as if the question is slightly surprising.

"A few things," he says.

"Like what?"

He leans against the edge of the desk with his arms crossed, and there's a studied casualness to his posture.

"Why, are you in a hurry?"

"Not a hurry," you say. "Just curiosity."

He looks at you a second longer than he needs to answer. Marking a slight, not quite neutral discomfort in the air, typical of someone who's never needed to fill silences with anything.

"Something acoustic," he says finally. "Something that breathes between everything else on this album."

"How d'you know what everything else will sound like?"

"I've got a sense," he says, and his tone sounds faintly pretentious to you.

You nod slowly. It's a good idea. It is, and you find it slightly irritating to acknowledge it that quickly.

"I was thinking along similar lines," you say. "Though not exactly the same."

"Not exactly the same how?"

"Darker. Quieter. Y'know? Not acoustic in the sense of stripped back, but acoustic in the sense of— the silence being part of the song. What you don't play mattering as much as what you do." You try to explain yourself while your hands sketch vague shapes in the air.

Christ. Too philosophical?

He doesn't say anything for a moment. He's looking at you with an expression you can't quite read, something evaluative in it.

"How long have you been writing?" he asks.

The question sounds wrapped in interest but with the edge of someone establishing coordinates: who you are, how tall you stand, how much you weigh, whether you're worth taking seriously or merely into account.

It could bother you. Part of you decides that yes, a little, it does.

"Long enough" you say.

"Long enough..." he repeats, as if tasting it.

The door opens and Tricky comes back in still wearing his hood, sits down in the same spot as before, and says he's got an idea for the rhythmic structure of the track he wants to tell you about, and the conversation shifts and the moment closes, but you can still feel it there, suspended somewhere between the mixing desk and the notebook sitting shut on your knees.

That night, on the tube home, you take out the notebook and write two words in the corner of the first page.

Long enough. Breathe.

Though you don't know yet whether they're for the song or for yourself.

When you walk into the studio the next morning Noel is already there.

You weren't expecting that. For some reason you'd assumed you'd arrive first, that you'd have a moment to settle in, leave your coat, be the one who occupies the space for a while before he arrives to fill all of it with his mere presence. But he's there, sitting on the high stool by the mixing desk with an acoustic guitar in his lap that he isn't playing, just holding, thumbs resting on the strings and his gaze somewhere in the middle distance in front of him.

"Sleep alright?" you ask the moment you see him, the caffeine already running through your veins.

He looks at you. A fraction of a second that might be surprise.

"Yeah" he says.

"I didn't much," you say, because it's true and because you've already said it and there's no taking it back. "I was going round and round on the song. What Tricky said yesterday about the rhythmic structure — if we go for something quieter, we probably need to think about how to anchor the rhythm without it losing weight, and I was trying to listen to references but I ended up listening to three full albums that had nothing to do with it and at one in the morning I was still awake with my headphones in thinking about whether the bass should come in earlier or—"

You realise you might be talking too fast.

He has the expression of someone who is listening but also processing a slightly higher volume of information than the question required, a question he didn't even ask.

"Sorry" you say. "Good morning."

The ghost of a smile at the corner of your mouth.

"Morning," he says.

"D'you usually get to studios this early?" you ask after a few seconds, because you can't help it; the silence has a texture that you find difficult to hold without doing something with it.

"Sometimes"

You nod as if that's a genuinely good answer. It isn't, but it's not the sort of thing you can point out without it sounding like a complaint, so you don't, you just decide to keep talking.

"I almost never do... I mean, I arrive on time, but not early. Today was a weird one. I think it's the anxiety of the first days, y'know? I still don't really know where my place is here so my brain decides the solution is to turn up before anyone else so I can choose where to sit before anyone sees me choosing— which in retrospect is a fairly ridiculous strategy because—" you interrupt yourself as you take off your coat and drop it over the back of the sofa. "I'm talking a lot, aren't I."

The attention in his gaze is completely still, no particular expression, the kind of attention that gives you no clue whatsoever about what he's thinking and that makes everything you've just said float in the air of the studio for a second too long.

Shit.

Too much. Too much too soon. You've just told Noel Gallagher about your anxious spatial management process on the second day of work and he's looking at you like you've just spoken a language he doesn't practise.

But then he looks away and goes back to resting his thumbs on the guitar strings, and you're already thinking about whether the melody you've had in your head since yesterday fits better in a major or minor key, and the moment closes on its own.

"The anxiety of the first days," he repeats, quietly, almost to himself, in a tone nowhere near solidarity.

"Yeah," you say, already without regret. "Don't you get it?"

A pause.

"No."

"Lucky you."

You say it without irony, because you genuinely mean it.

"It's more habit, really."

The way he says it makes clear it isn't meant as comfort, just information, and you receive it and file it mentally alongside the other things you're trying to learn about how this man works: that he arrives before anyone sees him arrive, that he holds guitars without playing them, that he answers with the minimum not out of hostility but rather out of hermeticism, as if words cost something he'd prefer not spend without reason.

At quarter past ten, Tricky sends a message. You've already been in the studio for forty-five minutes and Richard has just left promising coffee neither of you asked for. Running late. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. No punctuation, no apology.

Noel reads the message over your shoulder because you've shown it to him without thinking about it, and makes a sound that isn't exactly a laugh.

"What a surprise," he says, and sits down.

You turn towards your notebook to have somewhere to look that isn't him, and while you open it you think that you are perfectly capable of behaving like a normal person in a professional context and there's no reason why this morning should be an exception, and then you think that you've been on this project less than forty-eight hours and you've already proven twice that that's not entirely true.

"What references did ya listen to?" he says, without looking directly at you.

"What?"

"The references. The three albums."

You look at him. There's no mockery in his expression, or if there is it's buried underneath what looks like genuine curiosity, though with Noel Gallagher it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

"Nick Cave," you say. "The Boatman's Call, I've got a copy of— well, never mind. And then Portishead. And then I ended up on Neil Young's Harvest at half one in the morning, which I'm not entirely sure how that happened."

He doesn't say anything for a moment.

"Harvest," he repeats slowly, as if tasting it.

"I know it's got nothing to do with it."

"I didn't say that."

"You were probably thinking it."

"I wasn't," he says, and his tone is too serious for your liking. "I was thinking it's an interesting choice for midnight."

"One in the morning."

"Worse."

He isn't what you expected.

Not that you'd imagined he'd be your best mate, but there was something about how he moved through the world in interviews —that energy of a bloke who has an opinion on everything and doesn't need to be asked to share it— that had made you assume he'd at least be easy to read. And he isn't. Not with you yet, or maybe not ever, and that's more uncomfortable than if he were just straightforwardly unpleasant, because you don't know where to put yourself.

Three hours later the whiteboard someone left in the corner has a chord progression written on it, three crossed-out lines, a verse structure neither of them has officially approved but neither has dismissed either, and your notebook has four pages covered in handwriting that gets smaller as the morning goes on, as if trying to fit into less space than it takes up.

It's been, in strictly musical terms, a productive morning. In terms of everything else, it's more complicated to assess.

Noel works the way you expected and the way you didn't at the same time. As expected because he has judgment, a good ear, and a confidence in what he does that doesn't need demonstrating — he takes an idea and develops it with the ease of someone who's been doing this since before you knew you wanted to. As not expected because he doesn't explain anything. He just does, and if something doesn't work for him he lets it drop without flagging it, without considering it necessary to justify his decisions to anyone.

Sometimes you suggest things and he incorporates them without saying anything, without acknowledging it, simply the next time he plays the progression, it's there, your idea inside his structure as if it had always belonged there. The first time you thought maybe he hadn't noticed. The second time you knew he had.

Now he's playing the main melody for the fifth or sixth time, varying the tempo slightly, looking for something he hasn't found yet or hasn't decided yet is what he wants, and you've been thinking about the same thing for ten minutes.

"What if we add a second voice?" you say, tapping your pen against your palm. "Something going underneath the main melody, darker. Not competing with it, more like... holding it up."

His fingers keep moving over the strings for two more bars. Then they stop.

"No," he says.

Just like that. With the same intonation he'd use to say he doesn't want sugar in his coffee.

"No?" you repeat.

"It complicates something that doesn't need to be complicated."

"It doesn't complicate it, it anchors it. There's a difference."

"It's already anchored," he says and starts playing again, as if the subject is closed and requires no further attention.

You put the pen down on the notebook.

"It would add what's missing," you say, and your voice comes out calmer than you expected.

He stops. Looks at you with an expression that's almost kind, bordering on pity, which is the most irritating thing it could be right now.

"Look," he talks with the measured calm of someone explaining a philosophy to someone who probably hasn't thought it through that far. "What we've got works because it's clean. A second voice underneath creates a tension that people will try to resolve, and the moment they start trying to resolve it they stop listening to the song."

"Or," you say, "they stay listening to find it."

"That's not how it works."

"It's exactly how it works. It's what Neil Young does. You pulled a face when I mentioned Harvest this morning, didn't you? Well, Harvest has layers you don't catch on first listen and that's why people have been putting it on again for twenty years."

Something crosses his expression. Brief, almost imperceptible.

"It's not the same," he says.

"Why not?"

"Because what you're describing works on those records because the whole architecture is built to support it. What we've got is a track inside a charity album with a delivery date in four weeks, and putting in a second voice means rethinking the whole structure from scratch—"

"We've got enough time if we start today," you say.

Noel looks at you.

"How many records have you produced?"

The question lands in the centre of the room. Not an insult, technically. Just a question. But you both know —he knows— what's underneath it. That it's been inside everything else from the beginning, that it's what yesterday's long enough meant, and the patience of thirty seconds ago and the two ideas he incorporated without acknowledging, which is: you haven't been doing this long enough for your judgment to carry the same weight as mine, and we both know that's true even if neither of us says it.

"That's got nothing to do with it," you say, and your voice has changed, the calm from before is gone, replaced with something quieter and more tense, more dangerous in that specific way of when you're choosing every word.

"It's got everything to do with experience in the field," he says, equally calm. "It's not a criticism, it's context. There are things you learn by doing, and one of them is knowing when an idea is good and when it's good for another time."

"And another," you say, "is knowing when you're dismissing something because it doesn't work and when you're dismissing it because you didn't think of it yourself."

The silence that follows is different from all the silences of this morning.

Noel says nothing. He doesn't look away. And somewhere inside that silence, the way he's looking at you changes — something that doesn't have a name yet and that he's not going to give one to, but that's there, quiet and clear, like the second voice you've been defending all morning: almost invisible, but impossible to ignore once you know it exists.

You don't see it. You're too far inside the conversation, too busy holding the ground.

He picks up the guitar.

"Play something," he says.

"What?"

"What you've got in your head. The second voice. Play it."

"I'm not—"

"There's a keyboard in the cupboard at the back," he says, gesturing with his head without looking at you. "Or use the guitar if you want. But if you're going to defend it, defend it."

The absence of hostility in his voice is the closest thing to a concession you're going to get from him today. So you stand up.

The keyboard is out of tune in the upper octave. You notice as soon as you turn it on, a slight dissonance in the far right keys that in any other situation would send you to find someone to tell about it but which you now decide to ignore, because Noel is sitting in front of you, watching you with the same attention he used this morning when you were talking too much, and you're not going to give him the luxury of watching you make excuses.

You put your hands on the keys.

You've got nothing prepared, because the idea exists in your head as a feeling more than as a concrete thing, like knowing there's an exact word for what you want to say without being able to remember what it is. So you do the only thing you can do: start somewhere and trust it isn't completely wrong.

What comes out isn't solid. It's a fragment, a descending progression in a minor key that repeats twice and then mutates slightly, searching for something that doesn't quite arrive. There are moments where it works, where you can hear exactly how it would sit underneath the melody he's been playing all morning, holding it up from below like something at the edge of the audible. And there are moments where it gets lost, where your fingers hesitate, and the hesitation is audible. But you don't stop.

When you finish, the silence lasts three exact seconds. Until you see him shake his head.

"No."

"You didn't even let me—"

"I did. I listened. No."

"What you listened to is an undeveloped idea, not the finished result— if you give me—"

"The problem isn't the development," he says and his voice has that patience again. "The problem is conceptual. Even if you develop it, it's going to keep pulling in a direction that isn't this song's direction. And at some point you're going to have to trust that someone who's been doing this longer than you can see that."

You open your mouth. And then the door bursts open.

No knock. No warning. Just the door that leads to the corridor flying open and hitting the wall, as if the person on the other side had been looking for a room to discharge all their frustrations into, which is what Liam was doing when he walked in, with his parka on and an expression that was pure domestic storm.

"I'm absolutely fuckin' done with this," he announces, to no one in particular and everyone in general. "Really. I don't know why I agreed to do this. They're all fucking idiots, that bloke from the charity hasn't got a clue what he's asking for, and Damon—" he pauses to give weight to what's coming — "that little shit is the worst thing to happen to British music since the WWII, and that includes some very fuckin' bad things."

Noel looks at him with the expression of someone watching rain. Doesn't say anything, probably because this is a play he knows by heart and knows still has several acts to go.

You watch him with a fascination you can't help. Liam Gallagher has just walked into the middle of a conversation between you and his brother and is complaining about Damon Albarn as if it's a normal Wednesday occurrence, which it probably is.

Three years ago you would have needed to sit down. Two years ago you'd have taken out your camera to document it. Now what you feel is mainly tiredness and a considerable desire to be in your flat with your headphones on and no Gallagher within a three-kilometre radius.

Liam keeps going. Something about the tempo, about a production decision he considers a personal insult, about how he knows what a good song is and doesn't need anyone from Colchester telling him how to make one.

At some point during the tirade he drops onto the sofa next to you. And once he notices you, he looks at you with an attention completely unlike his brother's, more direct and uncomplicated, no layers.

"Hiya," he says, and his voice shifts register in a way that's almost comical, to a tone considerably warmer. "Didn't see ya there."

"Yeah, you were busy complaining," you say.

"Are ya on this project, then?"

"I'm in your brother's group, yeah." You gesture at Noel with your pen but Liam doesn't even glance his way.

"Unlucky," he says, with a grin that suggests he doesn't entirely mean it, or maybe he does but finds it funny. "What's your name?"

You tell him.

"Cute," he says, as if the name were a quality of yours and not a piece of information your parents chose. "I've heard stuff of yours. You're dead good, you."

There's something genuinely disarming about how he says it, without his brother's measured edge, without the architecture of someone who constructs as they speak. Liam tells you you're very good with the same energy he'd tell you he likes your coat —direct and without scaffolding— and for a moment you almost appreciate the contrast.

"Cheers," you say.

"No, seriously. That single of yours, the first one—" he starts and leans towards you, with all the willingness in the world to talk about this for as long as it takes.

"Liam."

One word. Noel hasn't raised his voice. Hasn't even changed his posture —he's still in the chair with the guitar in his lap— but there's a weight in the tone that wasn't there before. Liam looks at him.

"I'm having a rest."

"Rest in your own studio."

"Dermot's been—"

"Right. Out."

Liam opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at you with an expression that mixes resignation and amusement, the look of someone who recognises a pattern they've been watching their whole life, and stands up from the sofa with an air of complete indifference.

"Talk later," he says to you with a smile.

"Sure," you say, because nothing else occurs to you.

And he leaves. The door closed considerably more softly than it opened.

The silence returns to the room. You look at Noel, and he's already looking at the guitar, running his thumb over the strings, as if the last five minutes were a parenthesis that's already closed and requires no comment.

But you saw the moment before he said his brother's name, that second when he looked at you first, barely anything, before deciding to open his mouth. And you don't know what to do with that yet, so you do nothing. You sit down, open the notebook, and say:

"So..."

Noel looks up.

"The second voice," you continue, with perfect composure. "We're not scrapping it. We put it on hold and carry on with what we've got, and at the end of the week we see if the gap's still there."

It's not a question.

He looks at you for a moment that lasts long enough for you to notice he's actually considering it, without an automatic dismissal, and that's already more than you had ten minutes ago.

"End of the week," he says.

He goes back to playing the progression from the top, treating the conversation as finished, and you sit there watching his fingers move over the strings for a moment. Then you write the whole idea down in your notebook, in detail, in the corner of the page where he can't see it. As for Tricky, you heard nothing from him all day.

The fourth time Noel incorporates an idea of yours without acknowledging it, you still say nothing about it.

Not because you've given up, but because you've realised that's his language: Noel Gallagher doesn't say you're right or good idea — the idea simply appears in the song the next time he plays, integrated, as if it had always been there. It's a way of conceding without conceding, incorporating without admitting, and it's frustrating enough that you notice it and effective enough that you can't entirely ignore it.

What you have noticed, and find harder to put somewhere comfortable, is that the walk to the studio no longer has the same texture it did the first week. Back then you'd arrive with electricity in your chest, that anticipation of being inside something that matters. Now you arrive thinking about him —in the morning, on the tube, while the carriage lights make everyone look slightly spectral—, your head is already in the studio before you get there, calculating, anticipating, wondering which version of him will be in the chair by the mixing desk today and which version of you that will require.

And what bothered you wasn't the effort itself, but that the effort took up so much mental space before you'd even reached the door.

Which is why on Tuesday of the second week you arrive fifteen minutes late after spending ten minutes too long in bed thinking about whether there was a legitimate reason not to go. There wasn't.

One lunchtime, Tricky appears with a bag of Thai food for three.

"I've got an idea for my bit," he says, sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa because chairs don't seem to convince him. "Something that runs underneath everything. Barely any lyrics. Just breath and texture."

You and Noel look at each other. It's exactly what you've been trying to defend for two weeks.

Noel looks at him. Looks at his own notebook. Avoiding your expectant gaze as he works out his next move. And after several seconds of internal debate that you can almost hear inside his head, he ends up sighing, resigned.

"Go on, then" he says.

And you open your notebook with a smile, to the page where you wrote the full idea —the one you'd been developing independently— but you say nothing, and let the moment exist without pointing it out.

Tricky also throws in an idea for the bassline that's genuinely good and that the three of you develop for an hour before he takes a call and disappears with the same atmosphere he arrived with, leaving the takeaway containers scattered around and a note written on the back of a receipt that just says good spot, which neither of you quite knows what to do with, but which Noel pockets without comment.

On Friday you work until half eight in the evening.

You don't plan it. It's just that at some point the song is in a place where stopping feels like letting go of something that isn't ready to be let go of, and neither of you proposes it but neither of you gets up either. Richard appears at six to say the studio closes at nine and you both nod without looking at him, leaving him with the expression of someone who has learned not to insist.

At quarter to seven Noel sets the guitar down and stretches in the chair with his arms over his head, and you're standing with your back to him looking at the whiteboard, which over the course of the week has accumulated things that no longer look like a skeleton but like something with muscle and weight and the recognisable shape of a song that actually exists.

"The bridge," you say, without turning around.

"What about it?"

"There isn't one," you say, stating the obvious.

"I know."

"Have you got anything?"

A pause.

"Fragments."

You turn. He has a piece of paper in his hand, folded in four, that you hadn't seen before, and he holds it out to you without getting up.

You unfold it. Four lines. Unfinished, with words crossed out and options written above in small, tight handwriting, but they're there, and as you read them you recognise something that takes a moment to locate — it's the image you wrote yourself in the notebook the first week, the one about something breaking slowly and without sound, but developed, taken somewhere you hadn't reached yet. He's been working on it. Without telling you.

You look up and he's looking at you in a way that isn't quite neutral, and looks away the moment you find it, going back to the guitar, readjusting his fingers on the fret.

He says nothing. You fold the paper carefully and leave it on the table, between the two of you, in the space you've been sharing without ever having agreed to, and you go back to the whiteboard.

"It's good," you say, without looking at him. Doing exactly what he'd do.

"Yeah," he says.

And that's all. But it's enough to know you've got a bridge.

On Monday of the third week you arrive at the studio and there's a coffee on top of your notebook.

There's nobody else in the room yet, just Noel on his usual stool, looking at his notes, not even glancing up when you walk in, and the coffee is there, in the exact spot where you always put your things, in a cup from the place on the corner where you always buy it, which is a detail that requires a level of attention you hadn't attributed to him until now.

You take off your coat, sit down, and pick up the coffee.

"Thanks"

"I don't know what you're on about," he says, without looking up.

You drink it, and stay for a moment looking at the cup before opening the notebook, thinking about how complicated this man in front of you is —who does something like this and then denies it, who is capable of making a gesture and generating its own cancellation simultaneously— and whether that speaks in his favour or simply confirms that he's as irritating in kind moments as in difficult ones.

"You're very weird"

"You're going to talk, aren't ya" he says.

You frown at his response and spend the rest of the session slightly more irritated than you would be without the coffee, which is an emotional response you recognise as completely irrational and nonetheless can't correct.

The following session you're both leaning over your notebook, him with the guitar still hanging from his shoulder because he crossed the room to see what you were writing without bothering to put it down, and you pointing at a line of lyrics that isn't quite working.

The third week ends and the song is almost, which is the most uncomfortable word that exists in a recording studio because it means something's missing and that something still doesn't have a shape. Richard has started appearing more frequently, poking his head round the door with a smile that has fewer teeth each day, reminding you of dates you already know by heart. The pressure isn't new but it's heavier, like when the sky's been overcast all day and you know at some point it's going to break and the waiting is almost worse than the rain.

You haven't registered the exact moment he got this close.

Close enough that you notice the warmth radiating from his body through the sleeve of his shirt, a dry, constant heat that you didn't expect your skin to register.

Close enough that the smell of cigarettes and supermarket washing powder in his clothes reaches your nose, mixed with a trace underneath that has no product name, that is simply him, and which you find —with some irritation— not unpleasant at all.

Close enough that his fingers are three centimetres from yours on the page.

You don't look at them directly, but you see them —they're in your field of vision with the clarity of things you're trying not to pay attention to— and you think, completely involuntarily and slightly inconveniently, about how easy it would be to take his hand, about how his fingers would feel against yours, and that that is a ridiculous and irritating thought that shouldn't take up any mental space right now, so you push it aside.

You focus on the line, which doesn't help, because you already know the line and you already know the problem, and what's happening at the edges of your consciousness isn't the line but the three centimetres between his fingers and yours and the heat that's still there, not moving.

"The problem's the ending," he says, pointing with his index finger, drawing his hand away from yours. "It resolves too soon."

"I know," you say, because you do and you've been trying to fix it for twenty minutes. "But I can't work out how to keep it open without it sounding incomplete."

"Sounding incomplete isn't necessarily bad."

"For this part it is." You put a hand over your face and rest your back against the base of the sofa.

He doesn't respond immediately. He's looking at the line with a concentration that's different from his usual expression, and it gives you a few seconds in which you can look at him without him noticing. The slight furrow of his brows. His lips pressed together, as if the solution is about to come and his body knows it before his head does. The way his throat moves, slowly, when he swallows. The line of his nose in profile, which from this angle has a geometry you didn't expect to matter to you.

You don't know at what point you started finding him attractive. You just know that you do now, in a very specific and inconvenient way, and that you wish you hadn’t realised it.

"What did you mean when you wrote it?" he asks, catching your gaze and pulling you out of your reverie, making you feel faintly embarrassed by the freedom of your thoughts.

"Something that leaves without quite leaving," you say. "That stays on the edge."

He nods, slowly. Then he takes the pen from your hand —with the ease of someone who hasn't considered this might be a significant gesture— and crosses out the last two words of the line to write something else just above.

What's left is better. Both of you know it.

He hands the pen back. His fingers brush yours a moment, no more than the exchange requires. Neither mentions it, but you're conscious of it for the next forty minutes with a precision you find slightly uncomfortable.

Until through the half-open door to the corridor comes a dull thud, then another, and then the unmistakable sound of something hitting the floor.

You look up from the notebook.

"Should we—"

"No," says Noel, without taking his eyes off the guitar.

"But they might be—"

"Nothing that hasn't happened before."

He says it with such absolute, weary conviction that it is, somehow, completely reassuring. But from the corridor comes another thud, further away, followed by a disturbing silence and then Liam's voice with a clarity suggesting the conversation on the other side of the wall has gone up in volume considerably.

"The peach has nowt to do with it you prick! I'm talking about music production, not a fuckin' fruit!"

You look at Noel. His eyes are closed with the expression of someone counting to ten in several languages.

"The peach?" you say.

"Don't pry," he says.

"But—"

"Please."

You don't. But for the next five minutes every time you look at him you have to make an active effort not to smile, and at some point he notices and looks away with something at the corner of his mouth that could be almost anything.

The last week Richard has stopped coming with his folder. He just pops his head round, looks at you both, and leaves, having accepted he has no control over the situation —over any of the situations, actually— and simply hoping things don't go too badly.

The song is almost. The bridge is almost. Everything is almost, but that still means something's missing and that something still doesn't have an exact name.

It's nine at night and neither of you has suggested leaving.

Noel brought beers at some point in the afternoon, two cans from the off-licence on the corner that he set on the table without comment, the same gesture as the coffee weeks ago. You picked yours up without commenting either, and that's how you've been for a while, both on the sofa instead of in your usual working spots, with notes scattered across the table, the guitar leaning against the wall and the specific weight of a night that's run longer than planned without anyone deciding it should.

It's, you recognise, the most comfortable the two of you have ever been.

"The bridge works," you say, looking at the ceiling.

"Almost."

"Almost is enough for tonight."

He doesn't disagree, which is his version of agreeing, and you take a sip. The beer is warm because you've been here too long, but it doesn't matter, the temperature of the room and the particular silence of a studio at night makes everything feel slightly outside of time, as if the usual rules about when to leave and why don't apply here.

"How did ya end up in this?" he asks, out of nowhere.

"The project?"

"Music."

You look at him. He's looking at the can in his hand, not at you.

"The usual way," you say. "Y'know, a guitar, a bedroom, too much time on my hands..."

"Everyone's got a guitar and a bedroom," he says. "Not everyone ends up here."

That's a compliment, or you want to believe it is. And for a moment the conversation has a texture you haven't had with him before — quieter, without the usual edge, as if the night and the beer have taken the edge off things for both of them.

You tell him something. Not everything, but something: the Brixton flat, the demos, the night someone played the single on the radio and your phone didn't stop until three in the morning. He listens, which isn't always something you can tell with him, because with Noel you never quite know whether he's listening or just waiting for you to finish, but tonight it seems like the former.

"It all happened very fast," you say "sometimes I still don't quite know what to do with that."

"It settles," he says.

"When?"

A pause.

"Dunno. Hasn't settled for me yet."

You receive that without making anything special out of it, without turning it into a moment — you just nod once and drink, which seems to be the right response.

For a while neither of you says anything. You've had enough silences of this kind by now that they don't feel awkward; you've been in the same room long enough not to need to fill it, and recognising that produces a soft discomfort in you, because you hadn't noticed when you'd crossed that line. And you'd rather go back.

"D'you know what I thought on the tube today?" you say.

He looks at you.

"That a year ago I didn't even know this studio existed. Y'know? Not even this area, practically. And now I know it better than some places I grew up around, which is a really strange thing if you stop to think about it— like, the places that matter to you aren't always the ones you chose, y'know? sometimes they're just the ones you landed in and that's it, and—" you pause. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"Are you always like this?" he says, at a moment when the conversation has found a gap to breathe.

"Like what?" you say.

"Like this." A vague gesture with his hand that could mean anything. "All the time. Always something to say, always an idea, always so..." he searches for the word "intense."

He says it without an obvious edge. A quality in his voice that could almost be a compliment, that mixture of observation and distance that means you never quite know if he's seeing you or cataloguing you.

"Yeah," you say. "I suppose so."

"It's exhausting," he says, and takes a sip.

There's a pause.

"For you or for me?" you ask, still keeping the light tone.

"Probably both."

You see the movement at the corner of his mouth that at another moment you'd have read as humour, but the word exhausting has stayed in the air in a way that doesn't quite dissipate — it lives in that specific middle space of comments that present themselves as observations but carry an evaluation nobody asked to be made.

And something in you —that's been putting up with his hermeticism and his condescension and his ideas incorporated without acknowledgment and his denied coffee and every small version of this same pattern for weeks— decides that not tonight.

"Interesting," your voice has shifted slightly, not much, just enough that someone who knows you would notice. "That you're the one saying that."

He looks at you.

"What does that mean?"

"It means you've spent weeks in a room with me and the closest thing to a compliment you've managed is telling me I'm intense, as if that were a flaw you're being generous enough to tolerate."

He looks at you.

"I didn't say it was a flaw."

"You said I was exhausting."

"I said it was exhausting. It's not the same thing."

"In your mouth it is," you say, and you say it before you've decided whether you want to, which is exactly how you work and exactly the problem.

Noel sets his can down on the table with more care than necessary, which is his way of taking a second.

"You're lookin' for a row," he says.

"I'm just saying what I think."

"You've been saying what you think for weeks. In case you hadn't noticed."

"And you've been spending weeks not saying it," you say. "In case you hadn't noticed."

Silence.

"I say what I need to say," he says, with a calm that now has an edge to it.

"You say what suits you when it suits you."

You stand up from the sofa, just because you need to not be looking up at him from below in this moment.

"D'you know what your problem is?" you say, and you're not choosing the words now, they're just coming out. "You don't know how to be with anyone without putting distance between you. You've spent weeks incorporating ideas of mine without acknowledging it, letting me in just enough that I can't say you haven't let me in, and then on top of that you tell me I'm the intense one, as if the problem is that I take up too much space and not that you don't know what to do when someone doesn't make themselves smaller."

The silence that follows is different from all the previous silences, but you haven't finished.

"You make a kind gesture and deny it before anyone can thank you for it. Is that what you call saying what you need to say?"

"That's work."

"No, that's protecting yourself. Which is fine, but at least call it what it is."

The room is silent. Noel doesn't respond immediately. The anger and condescension from before are gone, replaced by a quieter expression that's harder to name, which makes part of you wish you hadn't opened your mouth and another part know you needed to.

"And you?" he says, finally, in a quieter voice. "Do you always say what it is?"

It's not quite a question.

"I try to," you say, though even as you say it you know it's not entirely true — that there are things you've been not saying to yourself for weeks, and that he's too close to some of them right now for you to hold his gaze with total comfort.

"Good for you," he says, and stands up and takes his jacket from the back of the chair. And that movement tells you the conversation is over because he's decided it's over, which is precisely what you were describing thirty seconds ago and which you now have no way of pointing out without sounding like you're conceding the point about being exhausting.

"Noel—" you say, but you've got nothing to add. Or you have and don't know how to say it.

"See you tomorrow."

He leaves, closing the door with a soft, definitive click that is, somehow, worse than a slam.

You stand there, warm beer in hand, the whole room to yourself and the hum of equipment that's still on even though nobody's working anymore, knowing you said what you thought and that that should feel better than it does.

You finish the beer in one go, looking at the whiteboard, then pick up the notebook and write a line for the bridge you'd been stuck on for weeks. And it's good. And that feels like the most unfair thing about the whole night.

The days that follow have a different texture to everything before.

You work. The song moves forward because it has to and that's enough to keep the mechanics going. He proposes, you respond. You propose, he considers. The exchanges are short, correct, and completely empty of everything that had been accumulating at the margins of the previous weeks.

In strictly professional terms everything functions. In terms of everything else it's like working in cold that nobody's admitted to by opening a window, the kind of cold that doesn't come from outside but from whatever used to generate warmth having stopped doing so.

Before there was friction, but friction implies contact —two surfaces rubbing together— and this is no longer that. This is managed distance, the two of you moving around the studio with the precision of people who have calculated how much space they need to avoid having to manage the other, and that precision is worse than any of the previous arguments because it requires effort, and the effort reveals there's something worth making an effort to avoid.

Noel is correct. Not condescending, not hermetic, not with that particular edge that's been getting to you for weeks — just correct. You can't argue with correctness. You can't find the crack through which you used to always find something, even if that something was irritating, even if that something was a row. Correctness is a door locked from the inside and you stand in the corridor not knowing whether to knock or leave.

You're correct too. You arrive on time. You work. You only say what's necessary about the song and nothing more, which for you is a considerable effort he probably doesn't even notice. You put the notebook in your bag at the end of each session with the same care with which you used to leave it open on the table, as if it now needs protection from what it didn't used to represent any danger.

The morning after the argument you arrived and there was no coffee on top of your notebook. You weren't expecting there to be, but you noticed it anyway.

Another day you asked him about the mix and he answered without looking at you, eyes fixed on the whiteboard, and the response is correct, useful, and completely shut. You nod, go back to the notebook, and spend the rest of the afternoon exchanging fewer than ten words.

Though there are times when you're working and a technical question comes up, about the dynamics of the mix, about a synth that still hasn't settled into place, about anything that has to do with the song and only the song. And the conversation works, correctly, until a pause arrives, one of those that before used to drift somewhere, and he opens his mouth. But doesn't say anything more.

You see it. You don't pretend you haven't because you're not capable of it, but you pretend it doesn't matter, that you didn't notice the exact moment he decided not to cross the line, and the pause closes on its own as if it never existed.

In one of those moments you were looking at the whiteboard and he says your name, just that, but hearing it in his mouth sends a small shiver down your spine. You turn and he has that expression you'd seen before — the one that looks like he's about to be something else but changes a second before he speaks.

"Second verse. D'you think the tempo's right?"

"Yeah," you say, faintly disappointed, without quite knowing why, or what you'd been expecting.

"Right," he says.

And that's all.

In the mornings, on the tube, you no longer think about which version of him will be in the studio today.

You think about the conversation, about the things you said and the ones you didn't get to say, about his face when he left, or the soft click of the door. About the line you wrote in the notebook that night for the bridge that you still haven't shown him because showing it would require a kind of openness you don't currently know how to offer without it seeming like something else.

On Thursday of the fourth week you leave before him for the first time since the project started, and you say see you tomorrow from the door, to which he murmurs a response without even turning, and the corridor of the studio has a length it hadn't had any time before.

And the last day arrives: final recordings, final adjustments, final pressure. Everything is final.

Tricky arrives at eleven with his hood up and a flask of coffee he doesn't offer to anyone. He sits on the sofa with his usual energy, and glances at the two of you — from you to him, staying a moment in the space between you. The amusement in his expression suggests he's registered something: the thickness of the distance, the way you both avoid occupying the same radius without making it look like you're avoiding it. But he drinks from the flask without commenting, and you decide you've imagined it.

"How's the track?"

"Ready," you say.

"Almost," Noel says, at the same time.

You look at each other for a second —the first proper eye contact in days that carries a trace of what it used to, even if only the friction of disagreement— and then you both look away.

After you fill him in, he asks to hear the whole thing before recording his part, so you play it, and the three of you stand in silence while it runs.

You know it by heart. Every entry, every silence, every place where the song breathes or holds back, and still listening to it like this —almost complete, in the room where you built it— has a weight you weren't expecting. You recognise what's yours in it, what's his, and what belongs to both of you at once in a way that couldn't have been achieved if you'd agreed on everything.

You try not to look at him, settling your gaze on the floor, the whiteboard, your own hands... anything that isn't him standing by the mixing desk with his arms crossed and that concentrated expression that you've found yourself looking at more times than you'd like to admit, and which right now, with the song playing between you like something you built together, you find almost unbearable to ignore.

When it finishes, Tricky stays still for a moment with his eyes closed, and you don't know if he's listening to the echo or just thinking. Then he opens his eyes and says he's ready.

He records his part in two takes. The first is good, but the second is incredible. When he finishes, he takes off the headphones, sets them on the desk with care and cracks his knuckles with a satisfied smile.

"Good," says Noel, from the mixing desk.

Tricky picks up his flask and puts his hood back up, ready to abandon the studio less than an hour after he arrived. But he stops with a hand on the door.

"Good song. Th kind that lasts," he says, though it's not clear to whom. " "A shame about the rest"

He doesn't specify what 'the rest' is. He doesn't need to. And he's out before either of you can respond, leaving you alone for the last time in the studio, with the song finished and everything else exactly where you left it the night of the beers.

"Right," you say, your voice breaking the silence, as you sweep your gaze over the mess of the room. "Last day done."

He only nods, and you weren't expecting anything more, and you start tidying with the professional silence of these last few days, each of you in your own orbit, not grazing the other's.

You fold papers, coil cables, switch things off. And while you do it you can't stop your mind falling into the loop that's been haunting you for days — on the tube, before you fall asleep, in the dead patches of these sessions that have felt so empty and so full of correctness lately.

You wonder whether you should say something. Whether what you said was too much, not enough, or exactly what you needed to say at exactly the wrong moment. Whether he's waiting for something from you that you don't know how to offer without it looking like surrendering, and whether surrendering would be so terrible or just being honest.

You don't arrive at any conclusion, which is the usual.

It is when you're leaning over the mixing desk looking for a pen you've lost among the papers that you hear him come up behind you — his steps, the sound his shoes make on the wooden floor. He stops close, too close for it to be purely functional.

His hand appears on the desk to the left of yours, not touching it, but there, and the heat of him at your back makes you nearly dizzy. All with the innocent intention of reaching the panel in front of you, one of the faders he's been checking all afternoon, a movement he's made a thousand times these past weeks without it meaning anything.

But at some point you haven't quite registered, he stops moving. And you do too. The two of you still in that second that lasts longer than it should, longer than any remaining task can justify, and you can't see his face but you sense him tilting his head slightly towards you, that minimal gesture that's almost nothing and at the same time is too much to ignore.

Then you see his hand. How it moves a centimetre, barely one, in the direction of yours. Not reaching anything, but moving. And you think that maybe it wasn't just you. That maybe he's been in the same loop for days, going over the same things, and that this proximity is perhaps the only way he's found to say it without having to say it.

But then he straightens up, taking a step back, clean and definitive.

"Export's ready. I can send it to Richard tonight."

And you stand there with your hand still on the desk, feeling like your heart hasn't pumped in too long, and with the question of whether you just experienced what you think you experienced or whether your head has decided to play a nasty trick on you in response to the uncertainty you've been building up since you first saw him, not knowing which of the two options is worse.

"What the fuck was that?"

The thought comes out loud. Though if you'd been aware of it, you probably wouldn't have tried to hold it back anyway.

"What?" His voice is perfectly neutral, perfectly closed, and that's what makes you lose what little self-control you had left.

"That." You gesture at the space between the two of you in a way that encompasses nothing and everything. "What you just did."

"I was checking the levels."

"No you weren't."

You don't accept the exit he just tried to take, and the muscle of his jaw tenses for a moment before he looks away.

"I don't know what you're talking about." He says it with a calm you're beginning to recognise for what it is: a mechanism, a door, not a quality.

"Course you do," you say, and you're no longer choosing your tone. "You've spent days not looking at me, not crossing a word that isn't strictly necessary, making sure you're never less than two metres away if you can help it. And then you go and do that and then act like nothing happened. What am I supposed to do with that, Noel? Ignore it? Pretend it didn't happen because you've decided it didn't?"

He says nothing.

"Was it deliberate?" you ask. "Because I'd like to know. I'd like to know if you did it on purpose or whether I'm imagining it, because you've been doing this to me for weeks and I'm starting to think I'm going mad. Was the fucking coffee deliberate? The paper with the bridge? Standing there staring at me when you think I'm not watching? Was that checking levels too?"

"Stop—" he says, but his voice is softer than it usually would be.

"No." You take a step towards him, not to close the distance, but because you need somewhere to put the energy in your body. "You've spent weeks communicating in a language I don't speak and then you're surprised I don't understand you. You make a kind gesture and deny it. You get to the point of saying something and then don't say it— I've seen it, I've seen your hand just two fucking minutes ago, and you're telling me you don't know what I'm talking about."

You take a small breath but continue as soon as the oxygen is back in your lungs.

"What the hell do you want from me? Because honestly, with all the sincerity in the world, I have no fucking idea." A bitter laugh escapes you. "I don't know what the fuck you want, I don't know what you're thinking, I don't know if what I think is happening is actually happening or if I'm making it up, and that is driving me mad, and you fucking know it, and you still say nothing— why? Why don't you say anything? What's so hard about—"

You don't finish the sentence because suddenly he's right there.

Without any kind of warning, just the movement and then his mouth on yours. And the impact is real enough that you lose your balance for a second, one step back that he follows with his whole body, not leaving space for the moment to cool before it's properly started.

It's not an elegant kiss. It has none of the composure he's maintained these weeks, none of the layers he builds everything with. It's clumsy and urgent with no architecture to disguise how long the want has been contained inside him.

You go dizzy. Not metaphorically, the feeling of his lips makes everything you had in your head three seconds ago, the questions, the anger, the entire thread of what you were saying, dissolve and prevent oxygen from reaching the important parts of your brain, leaving it practically useless and making your body take the decisions: kissing him back, as if that were the only response that made sense in the moment.

"God, you don't shut the fuck up—"

It takes you a moment to process it through how little his lips pull from yours when he speaks, as if pulling away more is something he's still not capable of. But you don't respond, you don't even fully comprehend it, because the only thing you register in that moment is that his lips are there and you want them to stay there, so instead of responding you tangle your hands in his hair and pull, looking for more, looking for depth, and he understands without you having to explain it.

His hands find your waist first, with a firmness that has nothing tentative about it, that says he's been thinking about this longer than either of them would admit, and pull you towards him with the urgency of someone who's stopped calculating. Your hands move to his face, his cheeks under your palms, the texture of the jaw you've been looking at from across the room for weeks, and feeling it like this —this close, touching it— is completely different from anything you'd anticipated.

Your bodies move, not elegantly, not with any kind of choreography, but with the clumsy and necessary movement of having been too long in the same room without touching and now that they've started don't quite know how to stop. Your back hits the mixing desk and neither of you comments on it, he just comes closer, filling the space between you with the heat of his body, and you feel his weight against you, the edge of the desk pressing into the small of your back.

His mouth pulls from yours for a second, only to find the right angle, and when it comes back it's slower and more deliberate, his tongue grazing yours with an intent that makes your stomach drop several floors at once. The sound your mouths make in the silence of the studio is obscene and intimate and completely real, reaching your ears with a clarity that makes you aware of every centimetre of contact between you in a way that's almost unbearable in the best possible sense.

His hands move, they're not just on your waist anymore. They travel your back, your sides, the curve of your hips with a familiarity he has no right to have yet and which feels, somehow, completely natural — like your body recognises the touch even if it's the first time.

You run your hands through his hair, over his shoulders, across the front of his shirt with the buttons undone at the top that you've been not allowing yourself to look at too long for weeks, and you feel the warmth of his chest under your fingertips and the way the muscles of his back tense when you pull him closer, though closer is no longer quite possible.

He breathes against your mouth when your fingers find the skin above the collar of his shirt, a small, not entirely controlled sound, the most honest thing you've ever heard from him.

With a decisive movement and no interest in subtlety, his hands lift you —without any resistance on your part— until you're sitting on the desk, him between your legs, his fingers gripping your thighs with a pressure you're going to feel tomorrow and which right now seems like the best sensation available.

He moves against you. There's no space between you for anything to fit, just the heat, his weight, and a slow and deliberate friction, as if he wants you to feel it. And oh, you do.

God, you feel it.

That exact pressure in that exact place that drives the air out of you and makes your hips respond on their own, looking for more contact without your head having given any instruction whatsoever.

You moan against his mouth, and he receives it with another movement of his hips, this time being worse because you already know what's coming and your body anticipates it with a precision that feels almost humiliating. His lips find your jaw, your throat, the place just under your ear, and the warm breath coming from his mouth with every exhale makes everything that can stand on end stand on end.

"Fuck," you breathe, with no intention beyond releasing the thought.

Noel comes back to your mouth, hungry and without elegance, and his hips carry on against yours with an intent that has nothing ambiguous about it anymore.

And it's exactly at that moment, with the heat building at the centre of your body, his hands exploring and his lips on yours, that your brain does something unexpected: it switches on.

Making you suddenly hyperconscious of the situation, of the contact, of the heat, of the fact that if you don't stop right now you're going to make a very large decision without having thought about it for even two seconds in a row, guided by want and not by reason.

You pull back. Not much, but he notices the change before you've moved more than a few centimetres, the tension in your body telling him something has shifted, and he goes still.

You look at each other. He has rumpled hair and lips that are flushed and wet, slightly parted as he tries to regulate his breathing. No composure. No control. Not one single layer of the ones he usually builds every expression he gives you. Just him, with nothing on top, looking at you without yet knowing what to do with the fact that you were the one who stopped.

"I need—" you start, and don't finish the sentence because you don't know how to finish it in a way that's both honest and manageable.

You get down from the desk. He takes a step back to give you room, automatically, and that small uncalculated gesture tells you more about where he is right now than anything he's said in weeks.

"I—" you start, already looking for your jacket. "I need to think, y'know? like— what this is, because there's a lot of information here that I haven't processed and I can't— umm, I don’t know if I should make decisions like this with all this on top of me because then I regret things I've done when I haven't thought about them, y'know? and this is not something I want to regret, right? Not like this, I need— I just need a moment to—"

You find the jacket. The notebook. The bag.

"A moment..." you say again, even though you already have the strap on your shoulder.

He's looking at you from where he's standing, not moving, arms at his sides and that expression without layers still on his face, with the particular patience of someone who has already sat through several of your monologues and knows when you've finished and when you haven't.

He can see it. All of it. He knows exactly what you're doing. But he doesn't say so.

"See you around," you say from the door and it feels like the most ridiculous thing you've said all month.

Your footsteps sound too fast on the wooden floor and your head is going even faster than your steps, going back over everything that just happened in an order that makes no sense. And you're three metres from the exit when you walk straight into something solid, which grabs you before you fall backwards.

"Ey." Liam catches you by the shoulders with the reflexes of someone used to chaotic spaces. "Easy pretty, where are ya going so—"

He cuts himself off once he looks you up and down, sees something in you that makes his expression shift register in a way that's almost comic, from surprise to something considerably more entertained.

"You alright?" he says, though his tone suggests he's already got a theory about the answer.

"Yeah, fine, it's been a very long day, y'know, the delivery and everything—" you say, and you're talking too fast and both of you know it.

He nods slowly, enjoying this more than he should.

"Did ya lot finish the song?"

"Yes, it's done, just need to send the export and that's it."

"Good." Pause. "Is our Noel in there?"

"Yes."

Another pause. He looks at you. Looks at the door. Looks at you again —your hair, your mouth— and a slow and completely insufferable smile spreads across his face, making no attempt to hide itself.

"I've gotta go," you say.

"Yeah," he says. "Clearly."

You're out before he can add anything, cheeks burning, his laughter following you down the corridor until the front door closes behind you.

For the days that follow, the shame almost won't let you get out of bed. It makes you bury your face in the pillow every morning when the first thought that hits you on waking is the memory of what happened on the last night in the studio.

He kissed you, you kissed him back, you moaned against his mouth, and then you gathered your things at top speed delivering an incoherent monologue and left through the door as if the studio were on fire. Running away.

You've spent weeks building a case against his hermeticism, against his way of closing doors without explanation, against how he withdraws the moment something becomes real, and then the moment things became real you grabbed your jacket and left without finishing any of the sentences you started.

There's no version of this in which you're not a hypocrite, and you know it, and it doesn't make it any easier to carry.

You spend the days waiting for him to do something — ça message, a call, anything— and simultaneously terrified he will, because you've got no prepared response that sounds reasonable. But there's no message. No call.

What there is is an email from Richard, congratulating you on the result, with an invitation to the launch attached: the War Child logo in the corner and the date, address, dress code. Formal. As if you could put on an elegant dress and walk into a room where he's going to be and behave like a normal person who doesn't have the taste of his mouth burned into her tongue.

But you go, because you have to. You're part of the album; your name is in the credits, and not showing up would be a complete discourtesy to the cause. So you put on a dress and walk into a room full of people with drinks in their hands and background music — the album playing through the speakers, your song included. And you spend the first hour moving through it with a strategy you won't allow yourself to call avoidance, even though that's exactly what it is.

You spot him as soon as you arrive, at the other end of the room, with a group of people you don't recognise, though he looks completely in his element. He doesn't see you, which gives you enough margin to spend the evening on the opposite side with a drink in your hand and a smile that you hope reads as more natural than it feels.

It works for most of the night. Emphasis on most.

You're taking a fresh glass offered by a kindly-smiling waiter, grateful to have finally escaped one of the most tedious conversations of your life with someone from the label whose name you can't even remember, when you feel the weight of the air beside you change in a way you already recognise, and you don't need to turn around to know who it is.

"Are you avoiding me?"

His voice, calm, comes from just behind your right shoulder.

You turn. He's there, with a beer bottle in his hand and a slightly amused expression despite trying to hide it.

"Bit hypocritical of you, innit?" he adds, with a half-smile.

It was, yes. But who did he think he was, saying that to you? And on top of that, with that mocking little smile at the corner of his lips, which makes the shame transform into a considerably more manageable feeling called irritation.

"I'm sorry," you say, turning to face him fully. "You're calling me a hypocrite? You, specifically?"

"Me, specifically," he confirms, not flinching.

"The same you who spent days saying nothing that wasn't strictly necessary, who denied a coffee he'd bought himself, who moved his hand one centimetre and then acted as if nothing had happened?"

That had nothing to do with it, but you weren't going to miss the opportunity to bring it up.

"That's the one."

"And it occurs to you to call me a hypocrite."

"Someone's got to."

He says it with a composure that's almost offensive, aware of the effect it produces and having no problem with it. And you hold his gaze, knowing full well you're losing the argument but with no intention of admitting it.

Then you see something in his expression —very slightly, underneath the condescension of the first weeks and the composure of the last ones— something like relief, so brief you almost miss it. As if this is the version of you he was hoping, or wanted, to find.

Because he'd never say it to you, but he'd missed it. This. You like this — defending yourself against something that has no defence, without backing down, without choosing your words too carefully.

He looks away for a moment, at the room, at the people, at nothing in particular, and when he looks back there's something more settled in him, less constructed.

"You disappeared," he says, and his voice has lost the edge, not entirely, but enough that you notice the difference.

"I left," you correct.

"Without saying anything."

"I said things," you argue. "Quite a lot, actually."

"None of it made sense."

You have to give him that, even if you don't say so out loud.

"And you've been on the other side of the room all night," he adds to his case.

"It's a big room," you offer.

"Not that big."

He looks at you. You look at him. And it's just like the first weeks in the studio —that balance of two people who know where the line is and are simultaneously deciding whether to cross it— except now both of you know things you didn't know before and that changes the weight of everything.

"I was embarrassed," you say, and you say it before deciding if you wanted to — which is how you've always worked. "About leaving like that. It was pretty—" you look for the word — "cowardly."

He doesn't say anything for a moment.

"Yeah," he says, finally. "It was."

You roll your eyes at the total lack of depth in his response, but you can't stop an involuntary smile from appearing on your lips. And he can't stop it spreading to his.

He looks away again, organising his thoughts before he can release them out loud, something —you realise— that doesn't usually happen to you. But which, after a month in the same studio, you know how to recognise in him.

"There's a place in Notting Hill," he says finally, without preamble. "Open late. Good music, not too many people."

You look at him.

"Are you asking me out?"

"I'm mentioning that a place exists," he says, with a disinterest too performed for your taste. "What you do with that information is up to you."

"Noel."

"What."

"Are you asking me or not?"

A pause, the kind that in the first weeks he would have deflected with some functional evasion and closed off. And he doesn't.

"Yes."

One syllable, no architecture, no layers, none of the elegant distance he's built everything he's ever said to you into.

Fuckig finally.

"Was that so hard?" you tease, with a smile.

"Don't start."

"I'm just saying, we've been at this for weeks, and this would have saved a lot of time and energy for both of us if you'd simply—"

"You coming or not?"

He cuts off what he recognises as the beginning of one of your monologues. You think for a moment —about everything you've been not saying to him for weeks that suddenly doesn't feel quite so urgent now that there's a place in Notting Hill that's open late and he's just asked you without wrapping it in anything— and you decide that's enough for now.

"Yes" you say with his same economy.

An: Oh my goodness, I really hope you liked this bc I’ve had loads of issues while writing and editing it (I almost didn’t publish it at all, lol) Also... I’ll probably disappear again for a bit, but I PROMISE I’ll be back! I have so many ideas and I’m dying to write, I just have no time. Love you all so so so much, kisses 💕

facultativ

Alex Turner, Alex Kapranos & Julian Casablancas c. 2006

highflyingcami

OLD HABITS - PART THREE

cw: childhood friends to lovers; slow burn; manager!reader; angst; mentions of cheating and drugs.

𑣲 word count: 3,4k. ˊˎ-

wn: shoutout to my amaaaazing dearest @lostfoundnotdown friend for the song suggestion !!! posting this a little earlier than planned! wellpp… good luck

manchesterslurper

Noel Gallagher performing with Oasis at GM Place in Vancouver, British Columbia - January 23, 1998

shesselectricc

hi i’m thinking 💭 about like 2008-2009 noel when he looked suuuuper scruffy and had his hair all grown out with that little white streak … who’s super duper stressed - oasis splitting up his brother being a cunt bla bla… with his younger girlfriend who’s sometimes just too much! always holding onto his arm wanting him to go out and do something and honestly he just doesn’t really want to leave the house!! so instead of getting all annoyed and shouting he does hat he knows best to shut you up…

pushes you down into the bed, sliding into you in one lomg thrust as his arm makes its way around your throat, bending over you so he’s pressed flush against you as he fucks into you - it’s not harsh, no snapping hips, but deep thrusts he knows will make your eyes roll back, free hand brushing your hair away from your face as he angles his head slightly above your to look down at you, squeezing his arm tighter around your neck, “just needed you to shut the fuck up for five minutes, pet” he whispers, and every time your desperate little whimpers try to slip out he tightens his arm, thrusts speeding up as he whispers “what fucking part of shut up do you not understand”

anyway hi 😊

highflyingcami

btw i had this idea that’s been sitting in my notes for a while and i thought “what would be better than to tell cami and see if she can make something out of this?”

basically reader and noel are both travelling with the inspiral carpets, only noel’s a roadie and she’s a groupie. but he falls for her the way teenagers do and even though they’re the same age she seems so much more older than him and he’s all awkward in her presence and wtv. she can’t help but see him as a boy.

at some point they get closer and, out of curiosity, she like complies and they have a little situation but when he asks her to leave the band and be with him she says no because she’s content with the life she has (“i didn’t even finish school— i couldn’t find a job for the life of me” “i’m happy with a baggie of coke and a rockstar that cares enough for me to not let me live on the street”) …

years later she’s discovered by a guy who works for a modeling company and becomes a model. she becomes friends with kate moss and ends up at one of her parties. there she meets noel again, this time he’s gotten famous. something happens and they end up alone in a private place and they talk again ( “now that i am that rockstar you needed ages ago. am i good enough for you now?”)

do wtv you want with this lol i don’t have enough will to put this into nicer words LOL but maybe you could bring something good out of this

omg this is so yummy?…. like angst and sexy sex with feelings…. 😛…… however i💔💔 CANNOT take anything else to write rn… my to write list is obscenely long and this is SERIES material…. marziaaa… marzia… the call is coming from the house bby girl ……… 😏😏😏… you’d eat that up

meanmsmaxine

where noel helps you pierce your ears after seeing other girls at school.

cw: not proofread, needles / sharp objects, mentions of blood, at-home piercing??

a/n: short blurb for stmf also just got inspired since I went out with my friends the other night and we were talking about the dumb shit we did back in school :D

pairings: platonic-noel gallagher x fem!reader

shesselectricc

Control ༊*·˚

pairing: sub!liam x fem!reader

wc: 3.7k

cw: liam being a little shit, hatefucking, jealousy, choking, gagging, finger sucking, cumplay, mummy kink, sub/dom dynamics, sub liam, panty gag, riding, overstimulation, crying/dacryphilia, degradation, spitting, face/dick slapping, humiliation, edging, premature orgasm, cum eating, finger sucking

an: guys i'm sorry for the ending LMFAO i was gonna continue it but genuinely i could feel my life force draining from me by the second so .... it's not great sigh mamas not had a lot of time to write but!! i hope u enjoy anyway!!

dykwimean

WALK THE TALK: PART FOUR [18+]

96!Noel Gallagher x f!Reader

SUMMARY: The wire gets pulled taut, and Noel finally snaps. It’s just the matter of how he does it that interests you.

WORD COUNT: 10, 135

WARNINGS: Drug use, mentions of eating disorders, weight shaming, misogynistic language, slut-shaming, piv sex, rough sex, name-calling during sex, spitting, slapping, blood during sex, mfm threesome, sexualised sapphic relationship, cunnilingus, anal fingering, semi-public sex

Part Three | Series Masterlist

torturredd

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